BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) (103 page)

She swallowed and nodded. “I can see,” she said and Bruce realized he probably didn’t look very good. He knew he was injured and he had dried blood on his face and his hands.

“Dammit, Jenna. I told you this wasn’t a good idea. I told you I wanted you to stay away from them. Why didn’t you listen?”

She was angry now too.

“How was I supposed to know what was going to happen? You’re so tight lipped about everything in your life it’s not like I knew what to expect. I was just going to look. I wasn’t going to walk in there and introduce myself. I didn’t know they were going to find me.”

Bruce stomped around the house trying to get rid of pent up tension and anger.

“Do you have any idea what would happen if they got their hands on you?” he asked. Jenna slowly lowered the gun until the muzzle hit the floor. The moment it did she started crying.

“Oh, god. Jenna,” Bruce said and walked over to her, sitting next to her and folding her against him.

“I’m sorry,” she said through her tears. “I didn’t know.

“I should have said more,” Bruce said. He was so used to hiding his life from her he’d thought that carrying on with it would still keep her safe. But that wasn’t going to happen. Now that she knew she had to know everything.

“What’s going to happen now?” Jenna asked. Bruce thought about what Dwayne had said about leaving. How easy would it have been for them to just pack up their stuff and leave to another city? Start new?

But he knew that Jenna wouldn’t leave. What was more, he understood it. He’d only lived in Williamsburg for five years and he loved it there. How much more would Jenna hold onto it, since she’d grown up there?

“The pack aren’t out to get you,” Bruce said. Jenna shuddered against his chest.

“I won’t be safe again will I?” Jenna asked. She’d made a lot of mistakes but she wasn’t stupid.

“I can’t protect you from them all the way. They have to challenge me before they get to you but they did, and I was losing. Tara is stronger than me and she’s pack alpha.”

Jenna sniveled against my shirt. “I should have known something was up with her when I found out about you.”

“You couldn’t have known. She can look as human as I do, she just doesn’t want to.” I took a deep breath and prepared myself to say what I had to say next.

“You need to stay away from Williamsburg for a while.”

She lifted her head and looked at Bruce. Her cheeks were streaked with tears and her nose was red.

“What?”

“You don’t have to leave, but you need to stay away from people for a bit. I’ll take you up to a place in the mountain.”

“I can’t do that!” she cried out.

“Honey, if you want to stay alive, you’re going to have to.”

Chapter 2

The idea of being in isolation, away from all the people she knew and loved, was terrifying. Jenna understood what Bruce was saying – she didn’t doubt that Tara, the wereleopard, had wanted to kill her. The woman had tried to kill her before, as it turned out.

It was hard for Jenna to believe that the leopard that had been at her throat a while ago was the woman that Bruce had been trying to date before they’d gotten together. And at the same time, it wasn’t that difficult to believe at all. In some crazy way that seemed to fit in with everything that was happening now. It made sense.

Jenna shuddered when she thought about Tara, about the attacks, about everything. Bruce was at work, and she was at home on her day off, trying to figure out how she was going to leave her life behind for a short while without getting homesick, without feeling like everything was a big mistake, without anyone in the town coming to look for her and making things worse.

That was the bit that bothered her the most – that the others might be endangered because she was being watched.

Tara had looked so normal when Jenna had first met her. Despite her hostile reaction to Jenna she had just seemed like a girlfriend. It had been easy to believe that she was a Manager at some company In Rhodestown. Seeing her as a leopard, as a shapeshifter, had been weird. She’d looked like an animal wearing Tara’s skin. The person Jenna had met, however brief, just didn’t fit in with the control freak of a leopard.

From what Jenna understood she had to leave Williamsburg for a while so that the others wouldn’t catch on. She didn’t know who she was going to tell. She didn’t know who was going to believe her. But when it came down to her life, the fact that she would die if she mingled with the town’s folk, it wasn’t a very big questions. It was
where
she was going to stay that bothered her more.

She wasn’t allowed to stay with people at all. Any people. Which meant that even if she went to Rhodestown, or anywhere else for that matter, she was going to die. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. It was like Jenna had stepped over the line where reality became a dream world.

She went down to the salon and put in leave. Bruce had negotiated for one day for her to tie up loose ends so that no one would come looking for her. That was more dangerous, for more people. Carla didn’t want to let it go.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “You never go away. I don’t think you’ve ever left this town.”

“Oh, we’re just going to run away for a short little honeymoon,” Jenna said. That was easiest, they’d decided. Bruce was going to disappear too, for a while. Stick with Jenna so that she was safe. And the fact that they’d just gotten married made everything easier for them to explain.

“No one in Williamsburg goes away on honeymoon,” Carla argued.

“Well, the rest of the world does, and I’d like to get away with him, just be alone for a change, you know?”

Carla nodded but she obviously didn’t know. And Jenna understood that. No one around Williamsburg ever wanted to leave. That wasn’t how things were done.

Next was the general store where she spoke to Murray. Her father’s friend was the closest to family now. After she explained, he narrowed his eyes.

“That’s very unlike you,” he said after a moment.

Jenna shrugged and tried to pretend like it wasn’t a big deal. “It’s just something different. Bruce and I both want to have a bit of a break.”

“From what?”

“I don’t know, life. Work. All of that. We just want to get away for a bit. Everyone does it, just not here.”

Murray nodded but he still looked suspicious.

“He’s not hurting you, is he?” he asked.

Jenna shook her head. “Bruce will never hurt me. If anything he will die protecting me.”

Murray was quiet for long enough that Jenna wanted to finish the conversation and leave, but just as she opened her mouth, Murray said, “You take care of yourself. And if anything comes to bother you, you come tell me. No matter what it is.”

He looked at her and his eyes were intense. She felt a shiver down her spine, and she felt that somehow he wasn’t talking just about the small things. Any
thing
, he’d said. Not any
one
. She nodded and forced a smile.

“It won’t be long.”

She was relieved when she finally managed to escape from the shop. When Murray had told her a while ago that she wasn’t crazy for feeling things she’d felt better. Now it was just another reason for him to be in danger. If he was closer to all this, the way she was, he was in more danger. But she couldn’t say anything about it, so she walked down the road with that smile plastered onto her face pretending like absolutely everything was fine.

She saw Williamsburg like she was never coming back to it. The old buildings, the dusty road, the shops that looked like they dated back to the nineteen hundreds with the exception of cars and electricity.

“Are you ready?” Bruce asked when she finally wound up at the lumberyard. He’d managed to get half the day off. She nodded but she wasn’t ready at all. She didn’t want to leave.

“Come on. Let’s go get our bags and then we’ll head into the mountains.”

They’d both packed enough clothes for two weeks. That was how long Bruce had said Tara had given him to sort something out. That was how long no one would touch Jenna no matter how much they wanted to kill her.

“Should we go there in broad daylight?” she asked.

Bruce nodded. “We can’t wait any longer. Tara gave us a day but she’s impatient and flighty.”

“I don’t understand how she’s in charge,” Jenna said. “The more I see of her, the more I hear about her, the more it seems like she’s the worst possible leader.”

Bruce shrugged.  “You’re right, but the animal kingdom doesn’t rely on character traits to choose it’s leaders. It’s survival of the fittest and Tara is at the top of power hierarchy.”

“The animal kingdom works fine though,” Jenna pointed out, and she didn’t have to add the rest of what she wanted to say for Bruce to know what she was talking about.

“Yes, but the animal kingdom consists of groups of like creatures. Even the shapeshifter world should be like that, but we’re all misfits. We don’t work well together and that makes the pack volatile.”

They got to the cabin and Bruce put on the backpack with enough non-perishables to last Jenna a while. He picked up his own bag and hers and they left the cabin and headed up the mountain.

Bruce led her on a trail she didn’t know, past the boulders she’d climbed and around the corner to a new face of the mountain. The trees grew in a thick tangle and they had to stick to the narrow path or they wouldn’t have made it through at all. Even then, small twigs caught at Jenna’s clothes, stray branches tugged and pulled at her and it was as if the trees lifted their roots on purpose to trip her every couple of steps. It was like the forest didn’t want her.

“We usually avoid this part of the forest,” Bruce said after they’d walked a while in silence.

“Why?”

“It’s difficult to hunt between these trees – prey gets away too easily.”

“Which is why you’re bringing me here,” Jenna said. He was taking her somewhere it would be harder to hunt her. The idea made her feel uneasy.

“I thought that we had some sort of safety until full moon,” Jenna said.

“Never hurts to be careful,” Bruce said in a nonchalant way, but Jenna didn’t buy it. He was worried. And if
he
was worried, so was she.

They climbed further and further up. She stopped at two streams to drink water, and Jenna later learned that it had been the same stream. She felt lightheaded being so high up and the air was chilly where they were. It felt like they were climbing up all the way to winter.

“Tell me about the pack,” Jenna said after they walked another while in silence.

“Should we really talk about this?” Bruce asked.

“Why not? It wouldn’t hurt for me to know what’s going on, and the conversation will distract me from the fact that I’m exhausted.”

Bruce glanced at her, sliding his eyes down to her feet like they were the reason for her fatigue.

“We all belonged to packs once, real ones. I lived in a big city where there were several packs. The werewolves had packs with more than fifty wolves. The leopards had numbers too but not as many. The bears didn’t really move in packs as much as they met up once in a while to stay aware of each other.”

Jenna nodded. It made sense – bears were independent, almost lone animals.

“The Assassins found us, one of the pack had told a human about us, showed him the transition and everything. It didn’t take long after that.”

“The Assassins?” Jenna asked. Hearing Bruce speak like this was like watching a movie – Jenna could almost see him transport back into time and relive the old days. And she could feel his sorry, his loss, something she understood.

“Did the human rat you out?” Jenna asked.

Bruce shook his head. “He didn’t need to. The Assassins work with psychics, like Dwayne. He used to be one of them but the killing was more than he was willing to stomach.”

“Killing?” Jenna felt blood drain from her face. Bruce nodded slowly not making any eye contact. He pointed to the floor where roots were lifted high above the ground so Jenna wouldn’t trip.

“They kill all the shifters they can find. And they make a mission of finding them. They say we’re an abomination.”

“Why does everything always end in death? The Assassins kill the shifters, the shifters kill the humans—“

“They only kill the humans when they know so that the Assassins don’t find them,” Bruce interrupted her, defending his kind. But Jenna frowned.

“Doesn’t that make them exactly the same then? The only people that are dying without actually wanting to kill are the humans. That doesn’t sound fair.”

“Life hardly is,” Bruce said and his voice was hard. Jenna swallowed.

“So, Dwayne decided to join the shifters instead?” She asked, trying to change the topic to something lighter. “What will the Assassins do when they find him?”

Bruce shrugged. “He’s the only one that’s done it, as far as we know. So that’s something we’ll have to see. But we’d rather not rub shoulders with the Assassins.”

Jenna nodded. She understood in a way. It was all very basic – survive, make sure someone doesn’t know about you, repeat. What she didn’t understand was how the shifters seemed to make it all more complicated. Bruce had said that the animal kingdom’s power structure was simple – the strongest was at the top and that it had nothing to do with character traits. And still, they all had character traits because they were human, too. It seemed impossible not to get the two mixed up and influencing each other.

They finally broke free from the tangle of trees into a small clearing. There was a cave opening to the left and a small stream, likely the same one as before, that ran past to the right with a waterfall that gave everything a chattering quality. The trees walled them in from all sides at the edge of the clearing, like some sort of jail.

“A cave?” Jenna asked, looking at the dark opening. Bruce grinned.

“It’s not so bad. It’s been altered a bit. I’ll show you.”

They walked in. The cave was smooth rock at the opening, but deeper in logs were used to fill cracks and holes and there were openings almost like windows toward the back. It was rudimental, but Jenna had to admit that it was cozy, and not much more primitive than the cabins she’d grown up in. It just needed a lot of cleaning.

There was furniture, too. Rough chairs, a table – al looking handmade – and a screen to the side where the edge of a bed peeked out.

“What is this place?” Jenna asked, looking around.

“It was the place I was supposed to live in when I joined the pack after I first came to the Syracuse Mountains. I only stayed here for a couple of weeks, I couldn’t deal with being away from people after I’d lived in a city for so long.”

“So you came to live in Williamsburg,” Jenna said. “You’d been in the area much longer than we thought.”

Bruce nodded. Jenna walked over to a squat bookshelf with a couple of dusty books. She fingered the spines, recognizing one or two of them from her father’s bookshelves.

“The others stay up in the mountains too, don’t they?” she asked.

“On the other side, yes. I didn’t want to join them.”

Jenna understood that. Even though they were live beings, they weren’t
people
. Hell, they were about as close to animals as they could be and still retain human form. She understood why they weren’t great company.

Jenna took her suitcase to the bedroom and put it on the bed. She looked around, looking for closet space, but there was none. She put the suitcase in a corner on the floor. She could live out of a bag for a while. She wasn’t sure she wanted to move into this place anyway.

The sun started to set and the home in the cave grew darker and darker. Bruce came into the room with candles, setting them on the nightstand, the desk.

“Candles?” Jenna asked.

“No electricity up here,” Bruce said and grinned sheepishly. Jenna nodded. She felt like she was half in a daze. A week ago she was happily married, just moving into her new home, ready to start on the next leg of her life. She had friends that were like family, a good job and a man she loved that loved her back.